The second interview that took place today was over at Final Boss.TV! Again Zarhym and Celestalon joined them! Check out the transcript below, with a special thanks to Mario for transcribing it while it aired!
Jonathan Zarhym – JZ
Chadd Celestalon Nervig – CCN
Q: What do you do at Blizzard?
Title: WoW Senior Community Rep.
JZ – Is a weird title. Most people know us as Community Managers. Posting on Forums, Manage Official Pages (Face, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter), PR Marketing Campaigns, Community Feedback.We take seriously what we do.
Title: WoW Technical Game Designer
CCN – I work closely with the games mechanics designers. Systems design. I talk a lot with the core designers of the game. The main aspects of the game and how the class design and collaboration between the various departments that fine-tune the game experience.
I got started in Blizzard during WoTLK – during ICC. I was a theorycrafter. And back at that time, there were a lot of issues with “armor penetration”. So I created a few spreadsheets with numbers and calculations on the subject, to improve the mechanic of the game which seemed broken at the time. So I posted onto Blizzard pages and the next few days, I received a letter from Ghostcrawler that said: “Hey, I like your ideas, let’s have lunch”. And that’s how I ended at Blizzard.
Q: How do you feel about your job?
CCN – I think is important to follow what the community has to say about the game; I like talking to people and seeing what and how things are at all levels. Reason why I stay up late most of the time.
Q: Overall, does your information have a positive effect?
CCN – Absolutely yes. Players is what makes WOW alive and it inherently, makes the game better. We spend a lot of time on the patch notes to explain to the community everything about the changes or everything that we intend to do with the game. It helps the players to see the bigger picture with what we intend to do with the changes.
Reason also why we redesigned the patch notes format. People now can click directly on their class and skip down to that particular section, instead of reading through all the text.
JZ – That can be specially important and interesting with a lot of content and technical changes as well, as players are concerned with mechanic changes to the game as well as their class changes.
Q: What about the CM (Community Management) team?
JZ – We definitely branched out recently. We try and be together and available in as many social media as possible, to capture everything that is being discussed, shared in the community; everything that we can use and that build a stronger rapport with the player base.
Just because we’re at the front lines, the discussion / the information sharing should not be only filtered by CM’s. It should be taken in by a wider channel to prevent information bottle-necks. And recently we have been adopting that strategy as well. We have many reps that take various channels of sources. In community, we have a total of 40 community reps around various regions that work closely with the community.
CCN – Also, other languages is a big thing and being close to international communities is definitely a priority. I want to be closer to those communities as well so, I want to try and participate on that front as well.
Q: What about the item squish. What’s happening there?
CCN – The item squish is something that felt doing now, because before MoP, it probably would create more issues than would’ve solved. But now, is the right time. Values just kept increasing so we are adjusting to a more simplified system to work with. Much more will come into play and more will be shared and revealed as we progress. We think is going to be smooth this time. It’s the perfect time to have that under control.
Q: Why should we have more faith in healing now, moving forward?
CCN – A lot of the feeling around healing still nowadays, reminds many about how good / or bad it was compared to TBC healing. So our goal is to get the good parts of past expansions, but only the good things. We’re doing a significant change on the mana regen system to have a better management.
In Mists, you started with too little, and towards the end of the expansion, you ended up having too much. So we wanted to address this issue globally from the ground-up.
This is intended to NOT make healing harder, but rather not make it one-dimentional.
Encounters are tuned around players capabilities. So the changes will allow players to be more in control and more aware of your healing.
There will be content where healing might be a little challenging – but our new difficulty system will provide a nice balanced level of challenge accordingly to each difficulty system (ie. Mythic raiding).
Q: What are you aiming for in Mythic?
CCN – We’re aiming to have 4 healers for a Mythic raiding group. Depending on a few encounters, the raid composition could vary between 4 – 6. But that is a choice that players will be able to then make.
Q: With the new healing model, will players spend more time below 100% health?
CCN – Yes! Because they can allow players to remain below 100% health. The mechanics will allow for that flexibility since the incoming damage will not be so bursty. So it may not require a huge amounts of healing, instead, a HoT could be used rather than the fastest-biggest heal. At the end of MoP, that has become the issue with healing. And we want to change that.
And even with the item squish, we want tanks to have a bigger pool and tanks should be able to mitigate damage rather than rely on healers all the time to keep them alive. Tanks are supposed to be tough and endure more than what they are currently doing. But we shall find a balance between 1 healer who should probably focus more on the tank.
Q: Raid Cooldowns. What is the logic behind solving the raid cooldowns?
CCN – After speaking with a lot of healers, we have to consider a few things. Healers are strong when it comes to keeping raid alive.
Healers should be the ones focusing on raid’s health, but it got out of control. We want to bring down the numbers of damage mitigation cooldown. The goal is to create a standardized amount of CD’s to the raid. Bringing personal survivability counts nothing towards the raid, but not for defensive cooldown.
So classes are now going to bring something of significance to the raid. An ability that amplifies an ability to the benefit of a whole.
Example: Misdirection. A buff that lasts for 1 hour and all threat built by hunters, will be transferred to tanks.
We are trying to balance it to the maximum. Once we get to the testing phase, we will see how this will play out and with the feedback, we will jump on it.
Q: Garrisons. What do you have to say about garrisons with Tier 17 and all the alts.
JZ – We’re sensitive about how progression raiders feels on garrison. Integrating garrisons with the game experience. Something like making like a part of questing. We’re working with Cory Stockton, so we should have a draft by the end of the week and get a lot of feedback on how the players feel about it and how we are doing. Maybe we should have a blog made within a week, as we want to involve players from the beginning.
It’s not really “player housing” per se, we know what this has meant in the past and what people expect from that and what people want. But we want to make it relevant to the game and what every player does in-game.
Q: Do you want to discuss the choice of gaming experience of players?
JZ – We have been exploring the choices we want to give to players that allow to choose their type of gameplay. Questing, Zones, leveling etc. I do not want to go into too much details because we’re still experimenting on a lot of things that we want to bring to the game, and Cory Stockton may punch me. But we’re checking how that can affect it.
Q:
Hit and Expertise – gone.
Professions buffs – gone.
How did you come up to remove all that?
CCN – Those stats are not fun, they are cumbersome. So is pretty not-controversial to get rid of that. Is not a major issue and players aren’t complaining about that.
Q: Why remove the profession buffs?
CCN – we didn’t want for players to feel forced to choose a profession for a specific buff or feel the mandatory pressure of going for it.
An example is Rocket Boots – Engineering. That’s what we want to address. But soon there will be a profession blog where we will share our ideas behind these changes. Moving speed has a long history. The way it works is a bit of mystery. There’s no indication of what stacks – no consistent rules… We tried to be consistent but we failed.
Our new system is much simpler. All self-only passive bonuses will stack – period. They will stack additively. Right now, they will add on top of each other. Both buffs will be on you, but only the highest will take effect. Once one expires, the other will continue until expiration. So all of them will stack.
Q: Snares and speed reduction suffer the same logic?
CCN – Multiple snares won’t stack! But it will affect the percentage of the mobility you have available. If you have multiple speed effects, they will be reduced globally.
Q: In WoD, we will be getting perks as we level. They don’t have anything to do with Path of the Titans?
Path of the Titans is character customization. The perks will allow you to choose what to improve in terms of spells/abilities. By level 99, you will have them all.
Q: Racials. What has the response been so far?
CCN – the reaction has been 50/50. The reaction is fairly balanced. But we’re still receiving very specific ones that makes us consider.
The Night-Elf racial. In MoP that racial is pretty bad. In WoD however, that is something that can really work well, since Haste, Mastery and Crit will be really close in value.
Q: Will that harm the stats of HC raiders? Is it not boring?
CCN – There is something like: Too balanced, and that is not good. So you don’t care what stats are in your gear. So what we’re trying to do, is create an important difference to make things matter. A sweet spot if you will.
Q: Weapon damage value reduced by 20%. What’s the point of this change? Scaling issue?
CCN – That ties into the changes of Attack power / Agility = 1. So 1% weapon damage in WoD is not the same of 1% weapon damage in MoP. This is just an attempt to make a balance between Melee Vs. Ranged damage. This is not a nerf. Is just balancing and translating to the new item squishing that is going to take place.
For example: Marksmanship Vs. Beastmastery. MM cares more about their weapon damange. BM doesn’t.
Special changes planned for WoD:
- The special effects for melee players when stacking behind a boss – the visuals will not prevent players to actually see what they are doing/casting. They are taking serious steps to address the issue. These changes will allow players to actually see what’s happening when too many players are cramped up.
- The same goes for SOUND.
On raids:
Initial raids in WoD:
- Blackrock Foundry (10 boss – 3 wings of 3 and 1 final boss a month later)
- Highmaul (7 bosses)
- Mythic 1 week after.
Q: Any special bosses?
Fun surprises in Store.
Q: World Bosses?
Yes. 3 in total (for now).
Q: Any hints? Any special things you can comment?
JZ – A time frame, this week, we should expect to see a preview of the making of the Tauren. The models, the animations. It’ll be really cool.
CCN – Blogs class-specific changes in the near future.